It’s been months since we all met up to present our work at the ULAB 2014 conference, and all of our members are now an academic year older.
Wherever you are; whatever you’re doing, we hope you look back fondly on the weekend we all shared in Edinburgh with our excellent 2014 conference hosts. We hope that if you’re still an undergraduate (or wishing to share some of your undergraduate work), you’ll join us this year at ULAB 2015 hosted by York St. John on 17th-19th April 2015. We’re sure it will be just as good (if not even better) than last year.

The Question of Proceedings:

Following the last conference, we received quite a lot of interest in the idea of a published collection of conference papers (a proceedings) that our members could digitally download and keep.
Therefore, following some deliberation over the practicalities, we’re delighted to announce that the ULAB 2014 Conference Proceedings will be available to download FOR FREE from the ULAB website from 1st February 2015. An email will be set to all members to remind them of the document’s availability.

Submitting Your Work for the Proceedings

If you’re are reading this, it means you (hopefully) presented at the last ULAB conference. Although PowerPoint slides make for easy face-to-face deliverance, for our proceedings, we’ll need your work to be in written, journal article form.
Therefore, we’d like to invite you to submit your written work to us by 1st January 2015.

Any work sent after midnight of December 1st 2014 will NOT be accepted.
The work should be reflective of what you presented at the last conference, though perhaps going into slightly more detail than you were capable of doing in a 15 minute presentation.

We have attached a form that explains how you should present and format your work, the word length/scope of the work and more. If you have extra questions, feel free to email us, message us on Facebook or Tweet at us and we’ll do our best to get back to you promptly.

Next Steps

1. 1. Find attached the proceedings submission document that explains the formatting guidelines and provides the required space for you to write your article. (***NOTE***: we can’t attach the doc here, so please check your email account for the attached doc, find it in the comments below, or send us a message/email and we’ll send you the form.)

2. Edit existing article/write article based off presentation to guidelines.

3. Submit work to this email address by 1st January 2015.

4. Act on the feedback of your editor(s) if necessary, and resubmit your work ASAP.

Following submission, your work will be peer-reviewed by the ULAB committee (others will be drafted in if there are too many submissions from a given sub-area of linguistics), and you will receive constructive feedback regarding how you can improve your work to help it more appropriately fit the guidelines better.

By 1st February 2015, the committee will (fingers crossed!) have received, edited and collated all submitted papers into a single document, including an introduction and thank you section. We’ll then upload it to the site for your online/downloaded viewing pleasure and send you an email to let you know.

So, that’s all for now from the ULAB committee. We’ll be starting to talk about next year’s conference soon, so while you’re working on your proceedings, keep an eye out for our emails, Facebook statuses and Tweets about applying to come to ULAB 2015.

Best wishes, and we hope to see you all (plus others!) in York next year,

Children who speak more than one language are better at filtering out noise, suggests research
Children fluent in two languages learn better in noisy classrooms than pupils who speak just one, research suggests.
Bilingual and monolingual pupils at a Cambridge primary school were asked to “identify the bad animal’ in a series of recorded statements.
When another voice interrupted the statements, the bilingual children coped best, the study found.
This shows “the importance of learning a second language early”, said co-author Dr Roberto Filippi.
The “acquisition of two languages in early childhood provides a beneficial effect on cognitive development,” said Dr Filippi, senior lecturer in psychology at Anglia Ruskin University.
Cow bites horse
Some 40 children, aged seven to 10, from Histon and Impington Junior School, took part in the research.
Of these, half spoke just English. The others spoke English plus another language, including Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Armenian, Bengali, Polish, Russian and Portuguese.
The mean age of both groups was 8.8 years and the parents of both groups had been educated to at least degree level, say the researchers.
The children were presented with images of two animals, one on either side of a computer screen, and asked to listen to recorded statements describing one animal doing “a bad action” to the other.
They were asked to identify which animal was doing the bad action.
The sentences ranged from simple, for example: “The cow is biting the horse,” to more complex: “It is the horse that the cow is biting.”
Three sets of tests were carried out, starting with the statements without interruptions.
The second set of tests introduced a voice talking about something irrelevant in English, in the third set the voice spoke in Greek, a language none of the children understood.
Both statements and interruptions were delivered by a mix of male and female speakers.
Primary noise
The bilingual children were more accurate in the face of interruptions in Greek, with 63% right answers, as opposed to 51% for the monolingual group.
The difference between the groups in the other tests was smaller.
The bilingual children also improved as they got older, overtaking the rest by aged nine, say the researchers, writing in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
They suggest this may be due to “more years of experience using two languages” and filtering out one when they are using the other.
“The observation that the ability to control interference improves with age, but only within the bilingual group, is a remarkable finding,” said Dr Filippi.
Primary schools “are remarkably noisy”, he added, “therefore the ability to filter out auditory interference is particularly important.”
A small study of pupils at a Cambridge primary school found children who spoke only English were more easily distracted by noise.